Traditional Owner meeting and FIRB review updates

Last week we had our first meeting with the Traditional Owners for our Project Area. This meeting was our first opportunity to introduce Meridian to the Traditional Owners and to outline our plans for the feasibility study we are going to do on the Kapok and Kapok-West resources. It is important for all our key stakeholders, not just the Traditional Owners, that they understand the timeframe and the process Meridian will go through in order to make a decision on whether to put the Lennard Shelf back in to production. That decision will be taken following the completion of the feasibility study in about 12 months time.

We took the Traditional Owners out to the project area and showed them where we will be doing the Kapok West infill drilling and discussed with them how the drilling will be done. Overall it was a very positive meeting and we trust that our good start to the relationship with the Traditional Owners will continue. Our aim is to ensure that we do our development in a manner which minimises our environmental impact and in a culturally sensitive way.

In recent weeks there has been a lot of speculation in the media about how the Australian Foreign Investment Review Board (“FIRB”) is assessing applications by Chinese companies to invest in Australian. The $10.5M investment by the Chinese company NWME in to Meridian is currently the subject of a review by FIRB. The statements made by FIRB in the media regarding how they assess these applications tend to suggest that the planned NWME investment in to Meridian falls well within FIRB guidelines. Our expectation is that FIRB will give the green light to the NWME investment. This approval should occur in October. As soon as the FIRB approval for the NWME investment is received, we will move as quickly as possible to commence the infill drilling program at Kapok West. As mentioned earlier, we are all ready to go at Kapok West.

We have also been working over the last month at looking at second hand processing plants which may be suitable for relocation to the Lennard Shelf Zinc Project. As a result of this work we have identified a 500,000tpa plant which has only recently been shut down and should be suitable for processing Lennard Shelf ore. We have assembled a team of engineers to complete due diligence on this plant and we are heading off next week to complete this due diligence. At the same time we are close to finalising the commercial terms for the purchase of the plant, subject to the outcome of the due diligence study. We are very excited about the possibility of securing a complete processing plant as it has the potential to save us 12 months in the development of the project (in comparison to building a new plant) and should also save us on capital expenditure. This could be a significant benefit for the project and we are pursuing it rigorously.

Over the next month the company should tick off a number of significant milestones with the most significant of these being the approval of the NWME investment.

Regards

Jeremy Read
 

2 Oct 2009